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Amy Goodman and Democracy Now seem to get lots of funding from various bigwig foundations - the Ford Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Threshold Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. That's from a long list on Joel Van Der Reijden's ISGP page with a bunch of links and dry paragraphs of various funding totals attached. Given all that, I'd have to wonder if Goodman could cross the road without checking with her funders first.

Joel has also posted a PDF of an article by Bob Feldman from the Critical Sociology journal, Report from the Field: Left Media and Left Think Tanks - Foundation-Managed Protest? The PDF is from a big paperback volume so the excerpt runs from page 427 to page 446. Scroll down to page 440 and you get a list of various folk that have given Democracy Now some cash.

I've never heard of most of those outfits, but elsewhere online I'm reading "According to the Lannan Foundation's Form 990 financial filing for 2008, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now Productions was given three grants, totalling $375,000, by the Lannan Foundation." Three years after that, here's John Pilger doing a piece for the New Statesman, noting how the Lannan Foundation ran around trying to bury his antiwar film THE WAR YOU DON'T SEE, and cancelled an appearance by Pilger.

..and the thread reprints a funny letter Pilger wrote to Noam Chomsky. This cracked me up -

I urge you to visit the Lannan website www.lannan.org Good people like Michael Ratner, Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald are shown in participants in discussion about freedom of speech. I am there, too, but my name is the only one with a line through it and the word, 'Cancelled'.

So with all that said I'm not surprised Goodman is useless on some of the bigger issues.

There is little doubt the it is Goodman's funding that keeps her not talking about really BIG issues. She gives little hint what she herself thinks - but that hardly matters when she has such a big audience and big effect. We need other progressive voices without censorship to carry the message as well as DemocracyNow! and Chomsky - BETTER! [and likely without much if any funding!....]

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn

It was during the so called "Pacifica crisis" where there was a big court battle over their governance structure. And no one knew how it was going to turn out.

Democracy Now was their biggest show. From what I understand, from being on the governance board of KPFK, she made a power play at the time to go fully independent. And that basically forced Pacifica to negotiate a deal with her to stay on. It was essentially a poison pill deal. Pacifica gave her their entire major donor list and rights to solicit it I think twice a year. Therefore, in a real sense, Pacifica became Goodman. But with that loot, she became bigger than Pacifica.

I could only take one year of this so I quit the board after that. As far as I was concerned, Pacifica became kind of useless and obsolete after that.

Amy's role as a journalist is more abroad and overseas, reporting on American companies and their corrupted operations such as the East Timor independence movement and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria. I doubt she strikes me as someone who as a journalist is interested in 'conspiracy theories'.

The space spent here proving facts about liars could be filled with someone's latest thoughts..

There's no shortage of space on this website for discussion. In fact, all of the participants in this thread regularly start new topics and jump into discussions when they occur. That said, everyone has different responsibilities through the day, and we'll occasionally be talking about whatever is of interest to us rather than attempting to cover whichever current event seems topical.

Any critiques of new JFK books which seem to be coming out at the rate of one per month?

Some major new JFK/RFK books are out in a couple of months, so you'll see a fair bit of discussion when they appear. I'm also preparing a couple of pages for the books and resources sections of this site, with links to some new online books and mags of interest.

All that said, here's another website (not a forum) of interest with plenty of reading if you've missed it. Robin Ramsay and a bunch of writers cover deep political subjects and if you dig into the list of numbered issues on the left-hand side of the page, (i.e 58, 59, 60, 61 etc) you'll see dozens of articles in PDF form, with plenty of JFK stuff.

I don't consider what people like Douglass does as "conspiracy theory".

Now she did have Oliver Stone on, but that is only because he has a big name.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the RFK murder, she did not have RFK Jr on. Michael Eric Dyson instead. What did Dyson present? He ran down RFK and exalted James Baldwin. Not one word about the things RFK did as a senator, like standing up to the NRA, not one word about his great primary campaign or his victory in California where he turned out the poor and the helpless in LA like no one had before.

Nice way to commemorate the most radical presidential campaign since 1936. Good doing Amy! On to East Timor.